It's The Color You Want It To Be

Somewhat inexplicably, last week my Facebook wall, along with much of the western press, was hijacked by a dress. Seems no one could agree what color it was; some saw white and gold while others adamantly insisted it was blue and black. Now, I haven't clicked on a single headline nor have I expanded any of the pictures, yet I somehow know that there's a controversy without knowing, let alone understanding, the details. I'm sure a quick search would turn up a plethora of divergent rationales and explanations by commentators, scientists, fashionistas and probably even politicians. This got me thinking about the more general state of affairs in today's world as it seems a perfect illustration of the lack of agreement there seems to be about anything.

The zeitgeist seems to be to trust no one, except of course the source you trust. This seems reasonable given the state of the world and the way our supposed leaders have been acting. Perpetual economic, environmental and social crises, a permanent state of war, and a drastic reduction in our civil liberties, democratic rights and future prospects have left many, um, shall we say, sceptical about the motives of those in positions of power and influence. Who can we trust in a world where everything is done out of a desire for self-agrandizement, as a result of ignorance, or, more often that not, plain old-fashioned greed? In short, this is thanks to the present neoliberal form of capitalism which creates perverse incentives that poison everything, and yes, I mean everything, from your drinking water to humanity's faith in progress.

Sure, politicians have always lied, but never before has it been so blatant. Ditto bankers and their ilk, but, seriously, there's no market they haven't rigged nor do they feel any scruples helping anyone who can pay to evade taxes or launder loot. Our athletic heroes turn out to be frauds or wife beaters and now we can't even trust little league games. Beloved entertainers turn out to be sexual predators or worse. The media is ever more transparently biased, little more than cheerleaders for those who pay the bills and grant the interviews and sometimes they just make shit up. We won't even get into religious leaders, but things have become just as bad for the modern world's clergy: scientists. Just as we'd once evoke a god to claim the moral high ground, the tendency today is to point to our preferred peer-reviewed study to prove our point. Yet, scientists are not immune to the disease. While science may be neutral in itself and has given us much that is good it can also be twisted and forged into a weapon to enforce orthodoxy and serve the interests of the wicked.

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people             - (possibly, depending on who you ask) Henry Kissinger

Sometimes it's blatant but the more dangerous variety comes in a more subtle shade. The latest Et-tu? moment, courtesy of National Geographic magazine, was of this latter treacherous variety. Millions have flipped through its pages for stunning photos and in-depth coverage of issues concerning our world and many have developed a fond attachment bordering on hoarding as they collect issues spanning decades, becoming a part of their fuzzy, feel good childhood memories. So when a venerated institution asks why so many people doubt science by conflating the evils of genetically modified foods with denying climate change, evolution, the moon landing and asserting a link between vaccines and autisms, it is unthinkingly accepted by a huge swath of folks. Here's the offending cover:

What at first glance may seem innocuous is in fact a clear attempt to wield the weapon of scientific knowledge to advance an agenda. First and foremost, what is that word evil even doing there? Shouldn't it be about safety? Even substituting objective for subjective language leaves the readers' brains grappling to compare four near-incontrovertibly proven issues with a fifth for which there's a near 50/50 split in opinion. What's up with that? Well, to nose out a whiff of the current system's poisonous incentives, all one needs to do is notice that most of the studies demonstrating GMO safety have been financed and conducted by biotechnology companies responsible for commercializing the very GM plants they're studying. Gadzooks! Maybe the National Geographic article was really planted as a lesson on why so many people don't trust science. It's not science per se they don't trust, it's industry, corporate-sponsored science they don't trust, whether it's pharmaceutical companies paying for vaccine studies or oil companies financing research to sow the seeds of confusion about climate change.

The article itself really isn't too bad, focusing as it does on confirmation bias while barely touching upon GMOs except for one throw away paragraph. Of course even there, Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach proudly unfurls his freak flag by mendaciously claiming that 'experts' have assured us GMOs are safe while conjuring an image of tinfoil hat wearers when discussing those who question the far from decided science. Worse, it's not even the safety of the plants themselves that concerns the most; it's the fact that so much of the modification goes into increasing pesticide/herbicide resistance, thereby allowing for increases in the amount of products such as Round-up used in farming. What is a safe amount? We don't know, or, well, the only safe threshold we or the FDA know is what Monsanto et al tell them. GMOs are a mass experiment being conducted on the public at large with no consent and no controls beyond what the corporate paymasters decide.

Even if we were to dismiss concerns about the products themselves, once again so-called progress is nothing but a neoliberal ploy to externalize the economic and environmental costs onto the rest of us by the Monsantos, Syngentas and Dows of the world. No, we need not worry that eating GM food will turn us into three-eyed fish, it's the costs that comes with handing over our food security to profit-seeking corporate control. The chemical producers' oligopoly on patented seeds threatens the entire agricultural industry while the diminished genetic diversity such seeds engender imperils our food supply by making it less robust against some unknown future blight, fungus, insect or plague which may evolve to be particularly good at infecting the crop grown from the seed that 90% of farmers use.

Round-up ready crops actually produce Round-up resistant super weeds and bugs meaning more and stronger herbicides will perpetually be needed to attain the same effectevess as before. There are also poorly understood unintended consequences such as these chemicals inadvertently sterilizing the soil of necessary funguses and worms that plants needs to grow which may result in a drop in productivity. Glyphosate has wiped out the vast majority of milkweed plants, the food source for migrating monarch butterflies, both beautiful and useful as pollinators. Speaking of which, what role does it have in the colony collapse disorder killing off our bees, responsible for 80% of the world's pollination. Oh, and that growing deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico, yeah, a result of run-off of fertilizer and all that pesticide.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it - Upton Sinclair

So, when we look to slap the evil label somewhere on this mess, would you put it on the forces doing all this damage while litigating small farmers out of business for patent infringement caused by a breeze, or those who question the sanity of such a system? Seems National Geographic would like society to put tinfoil hats on the latter in the same way they do on those who would have us believe Jesus rode a dinosaur or throw snowballs in Congress to disprove climate change. Clearly, we're expected to ignore the brazenly obvious conflicts of interest that arise from the revolving door between regulator and regulated. Otherwise one might question whether it's science or the promise of a cushy position in the future that determines policies on safety regarding food, drugs, fracking or banking.

Forget that what was once deemed safe has often turned out to be dangerous or you know, deadly. Don't question industry written provisions slipped into seemingly innocuous spending bills laws that bar federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO seeds, regardless of any health issues that may arise in the future. Ignore the fact that cartoon babies and teachers can get scientific papers published, easily done I suppose when papers that largely consist of the words "Get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated 863 times have been accepted by a journal that claims to be peer reviewed. Of course, it's no sweat to shrug that off considering the publishing peer review scam plaguing scientific journals involving fake reviews and even authors reviewing their own papers. Gaming the system has become a business with outfits charging a fee to arrange authorship in peer-reviewed outlets. Uncomfortable questions would inevitably lead to the uncomfortable answer that the neoliberal economic model has poisoned both academia and science. Who would have guessed that pressuring professors and scientists to publish would have such an effect?

Fortunately there's a couple of solutions on the horizon to deal with the problem of competing points of view. The US House of Representatives will most likely soon pass the Secret Science Reform Act and the Science Advisory Board Reform Act which would require the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to only consider publicly available data when making policy recommendations. Yes, the US Congress is actually attempting to make it nearly impossible for real scientists, as opposed to paid Energy Industry shills posing as scientists, to testify before their committees! For the rest of us mortals, Google is working on a way to change their search ranking from incoming-link based to groupthink based. Yes, to ease our cognitive burden, Google will tap into their 'Knowledge Vault' to determine how many false facts sites contain and bump up those they consider trustworthy. What better way to ensure we don't have to endure the unpleasantness of being exposed to contradictory views.

Seeing as simply questioning GMOs is dabbling in conspiracy theory, why not go a step further? I'd be willing to wager that we'll be seeing more articles like the Nat Geo story or the New Yorker hit piece about anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva in the near future. Despite producing 1.5 times enough food to feed the population, scarcity is all about inequality and the resultant maldistribution, I'll guarantee we'll be seeing more ginned up scare stories of the coming famine and the need for GM food to feed the world. See, the US Congress should soon be introducing a bill to grant fast track authority to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (the TPP). Approval would neuter any debate or amendments to the agreement, the biggest free trade agreement in history involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and about 40% of the world economy. Knowledge engenders debate, while surreptitiousness sanctions silence.

If you haven't heard of it, that's the way they, along with the corporate world, want it to be. All we know comes courtesy of Wikileaks as the deal has been negotiated entirely in back rooms, but what we do know ain't pretty (really, look up investor-state dispute settlement wording and tell me we don't live in a corporatocracy). As far as GMOs are concerned, the deal would ban GMO labelling, an unsurprising gift to the industry considering that the chief US negotiator on agriculture just happens to be Islam Siddique, a former lobbyist for ... Monsanto. You might have guessed had you read the Wikileaks cables which revealed that the US State Department acts as Monsanto's foreign marketing arm. Let's not even talk about how the World Bank and IMF recently forced Ukraine to agree to open their farming system to GMOs, that's a topic for another day.

Turning this corporate/government axis into three-headed Cerebrus is Bill Gates. Yes, although his billions have helped rehabilitate his image, transforming the former monopolist into a philanthropist, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation turns out to be every bit as evil as Microsoft. It makes sense when we consider Gates billions weren't earned through technology so much as his skill in developing the software EULA, or end-user license agreement. Not only are they at the forefront of the neoliberal assault on education, they've also jumped into the GMO debate with both feet and a stack of cash. In addition to (not so) quietly snapping up over half a million Monsanto shares, they also awarded a grant to Cornell University to "depolarize" the debate over GM foods. Despite their efforts, 'polarization' can be found by reading an open letter plea from the Alliance For Food Sovereignty in Africa to the foundation to stop funding the so-called GM 'super banana'. Having seen what the GMO industry did to India, Africa is begging for mercy knowing that it may not be possible to endlessly 'patch' the genetic 'bugs' that are revealed after the product is rushed to market without the proper testing.

It somehow seems fitting to wrap up this rant on the oft-times richest man in the world. After all, he earned his billions on the back of the present perverse neoliberal capitalist model that rewards mediocrity and pretend progress over human well-being. Not only does it externalize costs but it somehow does the same for blame. We can't hold corporations culpable for their destruction when they're simply doing what they are legally mandated to do: increase shareholder value. Neither can we condemn Joel Achenbach for writing such a piece as a person who wants to continue working for a mainstream media company (or think tank, university, government...) must toe the line in order to put food on the family's plate. However, we must be vigilant and call out those who would conflate such issues. Climate change exists. Evolution is happening. The moon landing was real. Vaccinations don't cause autism. Genetically modified foods aren't evil and in fact may have a role in putting food on all our plates in the coming climate change dystopia, but the corporate agenda and neoliberal system is most definitely evil.

From Nothingness to Everythingness

Can a decade really be nothing? One can always find bright spots, diamonds in the rough, hope for the future, right? After all, it could've never been if those Millennium Bug doom sayers we're right 10 years ago (just imagine my disappointment, waking up with a massive hangover on a beach on the equator in Ecuador, learning that the civilized world hadn't crashed down). While we may have misunderestimated the truthiness of so much we were led to believe, pwned by the meme that bling would bring us happiness, making us look like n00bs I feel some kind of recognition of the success of just having the decade is in order. Therefore today we'll look at the flip-side of nothingness, the top ten everythingnesses of the decade.

10. We haven't blown ourselves up yet, or otherwise completed self-annihilated. It's true, Kim Jong Il blew up a couple little firecrackers, but with over 20,000 warheads in their combined arsenals, Russia and the US could have caused a lot more damage. Negotiations are ongoing to replace the START treaty, which expired earlier this month, with a sitting US president who has stated his desire to see "a world without nuclear weapons". As was the case on July 31, 1991 when the original treaty was signed, the timing of a new agreement could help make the world a safer place. The original treaty was signed during the break up of the USSR and was instrumental in ensuring the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were completely disarmed. Today, in order to have any leverage in negotiations with Iran and North Korea or any other nation, sharp reductions in the numbers of warheads in the world are necessary.

At the same time pressure must be brought to bear upon the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Article 6 of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons states that each nation already possessing nuclear weapons "undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear-arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control". A strong commitment to reduce current warheads coupled with internationally agreed bans on nuclear tests and on the production of weapons-grade fissile material are desperately needed to avoid seeing the number of nuclear-armed states double in the next decade.

9. We not only speak in terms of trillions for dollars of taxpayer money given to banks but also volts thanks to those folks at CERN. A project that became more famous for it's end of the world potential and chronic problems seems to have finally hit its stride. They've spent the better part of the last 15 years and $10 billion dollars building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom-smasher, a 27-kilometre long tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border. The goal of the project is no less than learning what the universe was like at the time of the Big-Bang and discovering what has become known as the God Particle, or the Higgs Boson, theoretically the provider of 70% of the mass of the universe. While no big discoveries have been made yet, they did manage to become the world's most powerful particle accelerator by accelerating its twin proton beams to 1.18 TeV (or 1.18 trillion electron volts).

It's been a strange ride for those wacky scientists over at CERN. The LHC's official start up a little over a year ago was accompanied by as many stories about the end of the universe as the beginning. Some went so far as to try to block it's start-up in court. But something funny happened on the road to discovery. Something kept going wrong. Ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture it have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons. In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird.

All this got some deep thinkers deep thinking. In the same way that a coin couldn't keep coming up heads forever, it would be impossible for the LHC to keep breaking down for more and more absurd reasons unless something else was at work. In a twist on the Quantum suicide experiment, the theory is that the particle they are trying to create can travel back through time and undo the universe in such a way that the particle cannot be created. Or put another way, the fact that we exist now meant that the machine wouldn't work. So each time they tried to start it up something would happen to stop them. First a busted magnet then a stray bird, next a lightning strike or falling airplane waste; each time its stopped the series of events that stopped it would become more and more improbable. Alas, with the LHC now showing signs of fulfilling its destiny, perhaps it will disprove time travel at the same time it offers a glimpse of the beginnings of the universe.

8. Of course the LHC wouldn't have been as securely financed if the European Union experiment hadn't similarly moved forward a couple of unsteady steps, now featuring a boatload of new countries and a shiny new currency to boot. Up to 27 countries now and it's starting to look like it won't be one of the new countries this decade, 12 in all, that'll bring it down. Unknown to those member who joined this decade, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta in 2004 and lastly Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the Trojan Horse had already been deposited.

Instead of trying to enter Troy with a huge wooden horse, the Greeks have built a mountain of debt that threatens to collapse the grand experiment. Of course it might not be the Greeks that bring about the unions demise, but being a Eurozone country, (as in using the Euro as currency, the new ones aren't, except for Cyprus, Slovenia and Slovakia, and of course neither is Great Britain, at least 'til the pound completely tanks) their imminent bond default is sure to cause some kind of domino effect. The biggest obstacle to a solution, besides the idiots being too in debt, is that EU members can't give bailouts to each other, only banks. Well, I guess they could bail out non-EU countries, doubt that's covered in the constitution. Added to the financial woes (Ireland, Italy and even Spain aren't all that secure at the moment either) is the specter of religious infighting, from abortion fights in the European court of human rights to crucifixes in school classrooms and of course the whole Turkey question. Oh yeah, the non-democratic constitution forced on us is rather off-putting as well. How did the EU get on this list again?

7. I'm not in Yemen anymore. Having spent part of the last decade there I think I got out while the getting was good. Hey it's my blog, so seeing as I chose to wind up in Poland, perhaps the only EU member to have avoided recession heading into the next decade, that's at least something, if not everything. Seems like the Yemeni government is in a world of hurt in both the north, going so far as to spill into the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and south, where only a couple decades back they were independent of Sana'a. To make matters worse, America seems to have been reminded that Yemen is the home of al-Queda. Things have gotten worse by the day, to the point where some are calling it a third front of the 'war on terror'. Let's see, we've got a slow-motion oil spill, another slow-motion build-up to war, the slow-motion takeover of the world economy by the banksters, the slow-motion demise of the dollar, the slow-motion loss of national powers to the EU. Today I'll add one more - the slow-motion slide to a failed state. Yep, seems like the world may be left without a country beginning with 'Y' if things continue down this path in Yemen.

For years it has been seen as a safe haven for terrorists as most Americans would remember Yemen as the site of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole. Travellers know it as a place to avoid in case of kidnapping. Saudi's have known it as a place to steal land from to gain access to black gold. Somali's as a safe haven from complete lawlessness. Yemen, in it's current form hasn't even been around for 2 decades, having seen the North and formerly communist South, centred in Aden, unite May 22, 1990. Twenty unsteady years later and it appears to be coming apart from top to bottom. Up north, fighting has even spilled into, heaven forbid, the Kingdom of oil, the Bush's buddies, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's were forced to retaliate after incursions by Houthi rebels, named after their leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, into their territory. Many fear they are being supported by the Iranians in an attempt to set up a Shi'ite state or perhaps just a Yemeni version of Hezbollah, a permanent thorn in the side of the oily kingdom. 

The US got nervous enough for Obama to order some of those pinpoint accurate cruise missile strikes earlier this month, you know, the kind that only kill around 100 innocent civilians. The situation has led to yet another international refugee crisis that few seem to care about, except for getting the last remaining Jews out of the area. Oh yeah, plus the country is sure to run out of water soon as it currently diverts more than half of this scarce resource to the raising of the national addiction even during drought. Yep, gotta keep the populace and soldiers high on qat all day, otherwise President Ali Abdullah Saleh might have a real uprising on his hands. Now the drumbeat of the war on terror is emanating from the US as it seems Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Nigerian suspect who tried to ignite explosive chemicals with a syringe sewn into his underwear aboard a US flight, may have been equipped and trained by an al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, AQAP. The US was already hunting Anwar al-Aulaqi, the radical Yemeni American cleric linked to the gunman charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., Nov. 5. Welcome to drone attack mayhem Yemen.

6. We've set the table for the world's next superpower. Ha! I can just see you rolling your eyes saying, "just what I need to read right now, another bit about China displacing the USA". Well, ha, ha, again. It's not China, in fact it's not even a country yet. "Whaaaaa? Shane's on the crazy juice again it seems." Nope, wrong again. Well, no more than usual at least. OK, here it is. Greenland. Yep, you heard me right, put all your chips on green for the next spin of the economic roulette wheel because folks, they've struck it rich in rare earth metals.

Oh boy, where to start. The misnomer 'Greenland'? How is it that Greenland is an island while Australia is a continent? What on earth is a rare earth metal? Shouldn't 'earth' be capitalized'? How can it be a superpower if it's not even a country? Questions, questions. First, yeah, it's a bit weird naming it green when 85% is covered in ice, apparently it was the first swampland in Florida type of real estate ploy, pulled off by Erik the Red back in 986. Second, here. Third, and finally we get to the gist of the story. Rare earth metals are:

A collection of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, namely scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanoids. Scandium and yttrium are considered rare earths since they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanoids and exhibit similar chemical properties.

Fourth, no. And fifth, well, in case you missed it, Greenland is on the fast track to full-fledged nation status.

Fortunately, only questions two and five need to be examined closer today, and aren't we lucky, China will play an important part to the story. You see, while rare earth metals aren't really in fact so rare (another misnomer, great), about 93% of the world's supply is currently mined in China. Why do we care? For the simple reason that they are becoming more and more useful in today's technologies. They are essential in the production of smartphones, hybrid cars (the electric motor in a Prius requires 2 to 4 pounds of neodymium), precision weapons, catalytic converters, superconductors and low-energy light bulbs. China mines 99% of the output of the two most needed elements for these applications, dysprosium and terbium. The timing of the recent Greenland find couldn't have been more important as only a couple months ago China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a report which called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. The report, titled "Rare Earths Industry Development Plan, 2009-2015" also said other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs. Even crazier, Deng Xiaoping, then China's leader, gave us all fair warning as far back as 1992 saying, "There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China".

Denmark has ruled Greenland since 1776, only conceding limited home rule in 1979. It's been a long road towards independence and I'm sure that the irony of the fact that the melting ice has made the latest steps possible isn't lost on many. Remember, we're talking about the biggest island in the world here, so there's lots of good stuff being revealed by the retreating ice. Gold has been discovered and is already being mined, although so far at a loss, and there are deposits of other minerals such as zinc that could be exploited, and don't forget about the discovery of a 2.4-carat diamond at Garnet lake in west Greenland. Oil giants are negotiating licences to explore blocks of the coastline covering thousands of square miles. Although there are no proven sources, the US Geological Survey estimates there are 31.4 billion barrels of oil off the northeast coast alone. Greenland’s west coast may hold more oil than the North Sea, but harsh conditions could push the cost of extraction as high as $50 a barrel. Oh yeah, melting ice means water and therefore hydro-electricity. The vast lakes and melting ice cap provide enormous potential for electricity free from fossil fuel; in total Greenland holds 10% of the world's freshwater reserves. And now the discovery of rare earth metals.

All this has made independence a near reality as of June 22 of this year, when fireworks and celebrations in the capital, Nuuk, marked the latest step. Six months after 75% of voters (from a total population of 56,000 scattered over an area almost the size of Europe) said 'yes' to claiming control over all areas but defence and foreign policy. Under the self-rule agreement, Greenlanders will be recognized as a distinct people with the right to self-determination and Greenlandic will become the territory's official language. That means they now have full control of their natural resources which will be key to weening the country off the DKr3.4 billion ($590m) annual grant from Denmark which pays for public services like education and health care. Copenhagen and Nuuk have agreed to split profits earned from natural resources. For every two Danish crowns that Greenland earns, Copenhagen will reduce its subsidies by one crown. Greenland additionally will have control over its own justice and police affairs starting next June. As part of the new home-rule agreement, Copenhagen will also consult Nuuk when making foreign affairs and security decisions concerning the island. It may take a bit of time to rise to superpower status, but it's definitely no longer an option to buy Greenland outright, as America tried to do shortly after World War II. In any case, the going rate would be much higher than the $100 million the US offered the Danish government 60 years ago.

5. Americans, as individuals, are actually saving money as a country right now. Yep, maybe the crisis has taught the majority something as the rate, which subtracts what we collectively spend from what we make and then expresses the result in percentage terms, turned positive this year and was 4.4 percent in October. In 2009, it has ranged from a low of 3.4 percent in February to a high of 6.4 percent in May, which was the highest figure since 1993. Quite a turnaround from 2005 when the rate actually fell below zero! Alas, I fear it may be too little too late, like a heroine addict who just can't help himself, the country has dug a hole that may be impossible to get out of. Just last week the US Congress voted to temporarily raise the government debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion, but will need to do it again by February. Now, the US faces a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal. Like the smack addict, they've painted themselves into a corner by shortening the due date on the bills to lower the rate and will now have over $2 trillion in debt coming due in the coming months in addition to the estimated $1.5 trillion in additional debt financing they will need this year. It's no longer just the harbingers of doom prophecising the demise of the dollar, it's Greenspan himself, or at least Greenspan-Guidotti. Remember what happened to the economy when confidence was lost in the banks, try not to imagine what'll happen this year when the same thing happens to governments. How is this good again? Oh yeah, if you bought gold when it was only $1000/oz.

4. Panem et Circenses. Yeah, I know we have to put up with reality TV, but the oh-ohs (2000's, get it? mine, called it) also gave us tons of entertainment. From sports to film, books to music and some video games in between, we've been given some tasty pablum to trigger enough endorphins to keep us docile. Authors such as Orphan Pamuk, Zadie Smith and Khaled Hosseini have woven magical yarns. The Lord of the Rings trilogy wowed even the non Frodofiles on the big screen and we were treated to some bonus Bill Murray's genius and Amelie, even if it was impossible to get that soundtrack out of our head. The cure would've been Coldplay for many, but we also got some cool tunes outta OutKast, Daft Punk and Radiohead. Beyonce was pretty good to look at too. Throw in a Led Zeppelin reunion and the death of the King of Pop and music was covered. Sports team of the decade? The French national football team and Zinedine Zidane went from Euro and World Cup champions to headbutters and handballers, while Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona and AC Milan battled for club supremacy over here and probably those pesky Patriots of New England across the pond. Though I'm sure Red Sox fans would say otherwise having broken the 'Curse of the Bambino'.

3. Science is still pretty cool (and weird). Fifteen years after its discovery, Ardipithecus ramidus or Ardi, the oldest known skeleton of a putative human ancestor, was finally unveiled in 11 papers in print and online in October. The discoverers of the 4.4-million-year-old fossil proposed that she was a new kind of hominin, the family that includes humans and our ancestors but not the ancestors of other living apes. Another step towards the missing link, I know there isn't one, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees but rather through a series of progenitors starting from a distant common ancestor that once occupied the ancient forests of the African Micoene, but it's closer than Ida. This past decade also brought the mapping of us, the Human Genome Project, water missions on Mars and less spectacularly, our own moon, stem cells, commercial space flights, an explosion of planets, of the exo kind outside our galaxy and a new dwarf of our own, poor Pluto. While NASA's space faring potential is set to expire and then hopefully be replaced by Ares, interest in space has slowly been shifting to the private sphere as we saw the first space tourists while Virgin Galactic has inched closer to reality.

2. People Power. Yep, I'll throw the social media thing into this witches brew of good and evil, after all this is supposed to be about everythingness, and if it's anything, social media is everything these days. After all we started the last decade with a dot-com bubble and we ended it with the word 'unfriend' being the Oxford American Dictionary word of the year. Twitter brought us the Green Revolution in Iran, Facebook connected us with our ninth-grade girlfriend, Wikipedia told us everything else, Google not only became a verb it has also become as powerful as Goldman Sachs, and of course blogs and the rest of the internet has empowered us to such an extent that we, an all-knowing populace will be able to make informed decisions about our future.

Huh? What's that you say? People seem to be more interested in retweeting what music their friends are listening to and besides, it doesn't seem like the Green Revolution has brought the Iranian Revolution to an end, I guess it's tough when a mere 0.027% of the population use Twitter; Earth to Gordon Brown, Twitter cannot prevent another Rwanda. Your Facebook wall has become more important than your bedroom wall in expressing who your identity, becoming a black hole for your time, mind and ego. Wikipedia and Google are conspiring to make us stupid. Blogs have provided a forum for the semi-literate to spew their hate while the internet has heralded the demise of journalism. Instead of increasing the spectrum of ideas that users are exposed to, most choose to instead limit their sources of information to a narrow group of like-minded writers. With the huge problems the world is facing right now, progressives should be in position to move society forward, yet we still find ourselves in dangerous times as the bill for cleaning up the mess is still coming in. It may be forgotten that most of the problems of today, ranging from income inequality and lack of mobility, excessive debt, chronic underemployment to inaction on global warming and involvement in intractable wars are all problems to be laid on the doormat of the right-wing nutters. The disinformation experts are still spreading lies attempting to obfuscate the matter of who's to blame and seldom suggesting sane solutions; witness the rise of the warbloggers beating the drums of war, birthers trying to discredit a new president, death panel fear mongers, GW/CC deniers and their ilk.

Yet, it seems that all is not lost. We're still in early days, but there are some positive signs with former apostates of evil getting the message. Reagonomics architect Bruce Bartlett derides the Republicans one note cry of tax cuts. David Frum, who co-wrote with Richard Perle the standard neocon foreign-policy text, An End to Evil, wrote "I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure". David Brooks has disowned Sarah Palin. Ronald Bailey saw the light on global warming. With the coming challenges to be faced by the world on climate and globalization and to the US specifically, spiralling debt, an aging population, intractable conflicts, the old answers will no longer solve the problems. No, the internet didn't cause stupidity, it just facilitates its dissemination. Imagine if the status quo had these intertubes back in the day to spread the gossip of the evil that introducing child labour laws, enfranchising women, creating social security and introducing clean-air regulation would bring about the end of the world.

1. Hope. Not the kind served up by the Barack Obama show, but the real kind, the one America voted into the White House. Sure, Time magazine has called the last 10 years the decade from hell, after all it led off with a stolen election in the home of modern democracy, saw a dot-com bust, wound through 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq only to be topped off with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. While this may look bad from an American perspective, it could be good for the rest of the world. Maybe it's a good thing that the last decade was so bad, coming just in time to save us from our own hubris. Perhaps we'll learn to look to ourselves instead of the stars and stripes as it becomes more and more apparent that its empire is in the stage of decline. At the very least, we should start to get the idea that we've going about things the wrong way for awhile now. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil”, it seems the soil of our beliefs needs to be changed.

We began the decade believing we, by that I mean the west, by that I mean America, were on the verge of truly becoming Masters of the Universe. Never ending economic growth, unchallengeable peace, limitless progress in all fields were within our grasp. Instead, the Dow opened the decade around 11,600 and will close around 10,500. Meanwhile, the BRIC nations and other emerging markets zoomed ahead. Cave-dwelling clerics now seem to pull the strings in a global game of whack-a-mole, a war on terror that has us in Iraq and Afghanistan with new fronts constantly threatening to open. While the US and to a lesser extent NATO fights, the Chinese are doing business, investing more in oil extraction in Iraq than the US while also becoming the highest source of tax revenue for the Afghan government. Maybe it's a good thing we've learned that our heroes, from Barry Bonds to Tiger Woods, weren't the ideals we should all aspire to be; that the market isn't infallible, sometimes we do need to be saved from ourselves, or at least Bernie Madoff; or that Elliot Spitzer - even Barack Obama - aren't going to be the ones to do it. Most articles looking back at the past decade either do so scornfully or confusedly, lamenting that we don't even have consensus on a name yet.

Once again, I say the oh-ohs, for while the past decade sucked, at least we recognize it, which is really the first step to fixing it. We've spent the last 10 years caught up in reality TV while being blissfully unaware of the illusions marketed to us from Iraq to the balloon boy. The fact is, from genetics to the environment, we are on the cusp of having the power to control or destroy our world in many novel ways, so it's a damn good thing we've been given a slap in the face that may finally wake us from our slumber. After all, the decade will end on a full moon and being the second one of the month, it's a blue moon, seems stranger things have happened?

The wheels on the bus go...

'round and round, round and round. Just like the earth goes round the sun. This week the air felt clearer as if a weight had been lifted and the future once again bright. I was wondering what in the world many of us bloggers will write about now that our favourite target has retired to his ranch in Texas, when the light shone down and gave me a sign:

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE


What started as a little British story more than half a year ago, then spread to the continent has made the jump across the pond. That's right, it's the atheist bus campaign. In a two pronged attack the British movement is taking hold alongside an American incarnation. The nation that has spent so much energy trying to spread her beliefs across the globe finally seems to be willing to take some lessons from the rest of the world.

Could it be that the land of free and the home of the brave is once again ready to put science before the bible? While the first signs out of the new Obama administration are positive, there's still many reasons to fear the fundamentalists (I mean the scary kind, the Christians). Watching the Obama inauguration, not only did we have to listen to Rick Warren's invocation, one had to hear the g word uttered far too many times for comfort. However, there was a tiny crack in the religious armor that appeared with Obama's words: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." That's right, even non-believers are citizens!

Two things flew in under the radar last week. One, the Texas Board of Education tentatively adopted new teaching standards that would make it more difficult to teach creationism in Lone Star state schools in an 8 to 7 vote. Even more importantly, President Obama lifted the ban on US funding for international organisations that offer advice or perform abortions, hoping to ease the suffering of millions of women worldwide. In a move that is sure to piss off a boatload of fundamentalists, he quietly rescinded what had become known as the "global gag order"- not the comedy kind of gag, the one where if you so much as think the word abortion, you lose your funding from the US government. Reagan created it, Clinton repealed it, Bush re-instated it and now Obama has continued the ping-pong rally between knowledge and faith. In fact, much like a mirror-image of Obama, Dubya re-instated the law in his first working day as president. After a campaign in which he said, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us...If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us. We've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom." Then upon taking office, his first executive order imposed his way of thinking, the morality of the Christian Right, on the world. Of course, these were more innocent times, before the US was at war and there were more important things to worry about: (Get to about 1:20)

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I on News - First Family Privacy

Barack Obama Interview
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Sarah Palin Video
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Yes, before 9/11 my friends, check out the date, June 14, 2001, ahh, those we're the days. One of the new president's biggest challenges is going to be overturning the ignorance that the Bush administration propagated and return his nation to the path of science.

Unlike the signing of the order to close Gitmo, this repeal was low-key. This follows the inauguration ceremony which featured a religious tightrope act by Obama involving the above mentioned Warren and the liberal appeasing invitation to Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopalian bishop. Someone from outside of America wouldn't understand the controversy surrounding the words "so help me G(g)od". The same could be said of the controversies around the Reverends Jeremiah Wright, Rod Parsley and John Hagee stories, strange doings in a strange land. Of course keeping people stupid has its advantages, especially for the big corporations, particularly big oil. A little learning might make us question why a nation would want to continue feeding a habit that directly supports and created the people who wants to destroy them. The only reason to deny that climate change is possibly created by mankind's actions and thereby avoid doing anything about it is the religious answer. Only God has the power to change the world, little ol' us couldn't possibly do any harm. They miss the point. Whether or not climate change is a dire threat, the solutions to it is primarily an energy problem. Reducing pollution is an energy problem, concerns about the global oil supply is an energy problem, reducing dependence on foreign oil is an energy problem, reducing the trade deficit is an energy problem, improving national security is, you guessed it, an energy problem.

Maybe we should capitalize the word Science. The window of opportunity is closing for America to change its ways, to become energy independent through smart investment in Science. Even one of the American dollar oil fed creation of Abu Dhabi is creating a zero-carbon city, heck it won't even have any cars, as the emirate can foresee a time when alternative energy is king. Yet, mention CO2 reduction as a good idea to a fundamentalist and the same old myths to protect their right to continue supporting the enemy in the 'war on terror' through the continued reliance on black gold spew forth. Maybe we should ask a Bulgarian if they think it's a good idea to continue to rely on Russian gas anymore. At a time when more effort needs to be focused on investing in education, specifically real Science, we shouldn't be wasting our energy arguing about whether or not intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution or if women should have access to all possible health information. It didn't seem to matter when it was far more important to get into business school and someday work on Wall Street, become a Master of the Universe by inventing a new financial derivative. The true Masters of the next century need to be the Science nerds who invent things we can use and once put a man on the moon. This time the work needs to be done closer to home, from the $1.6 trillion in needed infrastructure to the power grid to the means of producing that power. Time will tell if America can be guided off its course toward ignorance and hate, but reaffirming the division between church and state is a good place to start.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Tyrannosaurus Redux

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video